And of course the classic example of the misleadingness of RBIs is Ruben Sierra's '93 season.
Joe Carter is feeling left out of the conversation for worst 100 RBI seasons ever.
Here's a short excerpt from a 2001 article about Stratomatic Baseball by Rany Jazayerli, talking about what he learned playing the game growing up.
Performance is independent of context. Strat-O-Matic devises each playing card to perform as closely as possible to the player's real-life performance, but in doing so the game company assumes that the context for each player remains the same as in real life.
For example, in 1990, Joe Carter had one of the great fluke RBI seasons of all time: despite a .232 average and just 24 home runs in more than 600 at-bats, he amassed 115 RBIs and cemented his reputation as a run producer. Those naive enough to fall for this failed to notice that batting ahead of Carter were Bip Roberts, Tony Gwynn, and Roberto Alomar, all of whom got on-base at a terrific clip, were pretty fast, and rarely cleared the bases with a homer themselves.
Strat-O-Matic correctly figured that in creating Joe Carter's card, there was no need to make a drastic adjustment for his RBI total. Used in the same role as he was used in the majors, batting fourth and fifth for the Padres, Carter would be likely to drive in close to 115 runs even with his terrible performance. But taken out of that context--in a draft league--Carter's RBI total would be more in line with the rest of his numbers: unacceptable.
